The outrage economy

There were threats of demonstrations, book burnings and even violence among some members of the Bangladeshi community. But was the controversy surrounding the filming of Brick Lane as heated as the media suggested? Not at all, writes author Monica Ali

All quiet ... Brick Lane without protesters. Photograph: David Sillitoe

On September 7 I flew to Canada to attend the Toronto international film festival where Brick Lane had its world premiere the following evening. After the screening the three lead actors and the director walked onto the stage to a standing ovation. The press reviews that followed were equally warm. The Washington Post, for example, decided that it was "the festival sleeper" and "a film that reminded you why you love movies". On top of all this, the film had been selected for the 61st royal film performance, an event which has hitherto been the preserve of blockbusters such as last year's Casino Royale

But my novel - about a young Bangladeshi woman who exchanges her village home for a flat in the East End of London - has had a far from easy ride in its journey from page to screen. Last year, while I was out of the country and blissfully unaware, a "controversy" was whipped up in the media over the filming. For safety reasons the production company decided to relocate shooting away from Brick Lane. Last month Clarence House (the Queen and Prince Charles attend on alternate years) suddenly decided to pull out of the royal film performance, citing a "diary clash". The "royal recce" - security checks at the venue - had been requested by the palace the previous week, so it seems that an alternative pressing engagement had only just made itself known. For the second time in 60 years (the first was in 1958) there will be no royal film performance this year.

Reading through the press cuttings from July and August 2006, it strikes me that there are a number of issues to unpack regarding this "controversy". The first is the nature of the press coverage. In January, as a patron of the building, I attended the opening of the Attlee Youth and Community Centre just behind Brick Lane. One of the photographers there said that he had covered the demonstration against the filming in July and that he'd had to "get in very tight" in order to take photos, there had been so few people taking part.

As seems to be the way with these things, press coverage began (in this newspaper) with the reporting of the views of a couple of self-appointed "community leaders". I love it when a journalist does this. I think of him stumbling around Tower Hamlets, waving a notebook and echoing the old colonial cry from down the ages: take me to your leader.

There were promises of large demonstrations, book burnings and thinly veiled threats of violence. "Young people are getting very involved with this campaign," one so-called leader enthused. "They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me."

What began in the Guardian spiralled, and made it onto BBC television news. But for all the attempts to inflame the situation, nothing much happened. One friend who went along to observe later told me that the demonstrators had been outnumbered by members of the press. The Guardian reported the next day that the march "drew no more than two women and 70 older men. [Even this number may have been inflated.] Threats of violence and book-burning failed to materialise."

Commentators were quick to seize on this damp squib, and Rachel Cooke, writing in the Observer, seemed to sum up the new mood: "The press must stop acting like a pair of bellows in such matters: inviting offence might make for a juicy row, but it also leads to censorship." Sunny Hundal of Asians in Media pointed out that the initial reporting had not been balanced, failing to mention that around 1,000 locals had queued up hoping to be cast as extras in the film - hardly a resounding rejection of the project.

Sarah Gavron, the film's director, was anxious to tell me that she had found a great deal of support in the area, worried perhaps that I had believed the initial press reports. I knew how she was feeling. People sometimes ask me if I have been saddened by the reaction to the novel of people with a Bangladeshi heritage. I explain that I have, over several years, had an overwhelmingly positive response from people of Bangladeshi descent who have read Brick Lane, both in London and around the world. I have a boxful of letters in which people tell me how this character reminded them of that relative, and a number in which young women confide their experience of arranged marriage.

These are people who have read the novel. But the majority, including perhaps most of the protesters, haven't. And I am aware that given the nature of the press coverage, and the rumours circulating that, for example, the film would show a leech falling into a curry pot in a Brick Lane restaurant (which doesn't happen in either novel or film), people who haven't read the book are now much more likely to feel hostile towards it. Those who don't share that feeling, given the reported undertone of violence in the campaign, are now all the more unlikely to speak up. It was interesting to note in the press cuttings that any local residents who questioned the demonstration's importance were "unwilling to give their names", though the couple of "community leaders" were entirely delighted to trumpet their own.

Media distortion is a part of everyday life. What do you expect? We shrug it off. Perhaps that's all we can do and continue to accept the consequences. In this instance the consequences for the "community leaders" were, as one commentator put it, in "foolishly confirming the prejudices they fear others hold about them". ("This is not a fiction book," one was quoted as saying.) The worrying part is that, in failing to provide a balanced picture, the media veered towards tarring an entire community - wholly unfairly - with the same brush.

The second bit of baggage to unpack comes with the label "authenticity" attached. Who is allowed to write about what? What right does a novelist have to explore any particular subject matter? Who hands out the licences?

It appears that some people object to my having written about a Bangladeshi housewife who speaks hardly any English, when I myself am reasonably fluent in the language. I'm far from being the only writer to be accused of failing the "authenticity test". Gautam Malkani, author of Londonstani, was reprimanded last year for writing about Asian homeboys in Hounslow because he is educated and in full-time employment.

This is dismal in many senses, but from a personal point of view mainly because it misunderstands entirely the nature of creative writing. Brick Lane is in many ways a typical first novel, drawing on concerns and ideas that shaped my childhood. For instance, there's a lot of me in Shahana, the rebellious teenage daughter, and maybe a bit of her still left in me. But writing does not follow some linear formation. The Gradgrinds of literary criticism, with their slide rules, and their scales, and their multiplication tables always in their pockets, sir, give you the facts, and the fact, sir, is that this writer is not now nor ever has been her heroine, Nazneen. This is a fact. One that neither I nor my publisher has ever tried to conceal or obscure. To attempt to do so would be absurd.

Why did I write about Nazneen? I think, but I cannot be sure, that the source was my mother, who is white and grew up in England. She made the opposite journey to Nazneen's, moving to Bangladesh (East Pakistan as it was then) to marry, knowing little of the culture and religion, speaking not a word of the language. When I was a child she often told me about that experience of utter social and cultural dislocation. I thought about it a lot.

Two plus two equals four and nothing over, as the Gradgrinds would say. They measure human experience with a ruler and a set square. But a writer must - strange, that this needs to be said - imagine the world in a different way. That is the job. That is what we do. And is this not literature's gift? Its contribution? To see through another's eyes, to take another perspective, and to take the reader along on that journey, goes to the very purpose, the moral heart of the work. It is the reason why I write.

In any case, if we were to take the "authenticity" requirement seriously it must apply to everyone equally. What right does Roddy Doyle have to write a novel from the perspective of a woman who suffers domestic abuse when he is not a battered woman? Taken to its logical outcome, men are not "allowed" to write about women, or women about men, and we are left only with memoir and autobiography, for which admittedly there is a strong demand these days, perhaps because nothing else is authentic enough.

It is sometimes said that only writers from ethnic minorities suffer from the authenticity craze, and that white writers are allowed to be artists, not operating under the same strictures. But there is one area, at least, in which this is not true - the fertile terrain of the post-war racial and religious transformation of this country. Think how few white writers have granted themselves permission to write about it. The result is what Hanif Kureishi has described in a recent essay as a curious kind of "literary apartheid".

The third issue, which is tucked away between the lines, concerns gender. At a recent literary festival I was on stage with Tom Stoppard discussing freedom of expression. I was asked if I thought that the "community leaders" were really angry about my book because Nazneen's journey is one towards independence. I agreed that was a reasonable assumption, but as they had not said as much I could not attribute that attitude to them. An Asian woman in the audience stood up and asked, "Why do you avoid the question?" She was quite cross with me. They don't like a story which is about female self-empowerment, she said. Why don't you speak about that?

I should have spoken about that, and this is what I should have said: If you read between the lines, it's not too difficult to see that this is a troubling theme. In a report in the Independent on July 22 2006, one of the protest organisers is quoted as saying, "Infidelity happens in every society; that does not mean that the whole of that society should be portrayed in such a negative way." The fact that Nazneen, who has an arranged marriage to a much older man, embarks on an affair with a much younger man was considered a negative portrayal by a predictable few. It wasn't the first time, and unfortunately it won't be the last, that conservative, middle-aged men are deemed to be the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable to a community. Privileging their voices in this way comes at a price. As Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters has written, the price is paid by weaker groups within those societies, such as women, who find their voices drowned out by the so-called leader, because of the "stranglehold of culture, religion and enforced mediation".

The fourth and most important issue hinges on a word much in play these days: offence. I find this the most worrying aspect of the whole affair because it is symptomatic of deep and far-reaching changes in our political, social and cultural life. The protest organisers say they are offended that a character in the novel - Chanu, Nazneen's husband - says rude things about Sylhetis (Sylhet is a region of Bangladesh). He most certainly does. Here is the passage, early in the book, from which the objectors most often quote:

"And you see, to a white person, we are all the same: dirty little monkeys in the same monkey clan. But these are peasants. Uneducated. Illiterate. Close-minded. Without ambition." He sat back and stroked his belly. "I don't look down on them, but what can you do? If a man has only ever driven a rickshaw and never in his life held a book in his hand, then what can you expect from him?"

I could, at this stage, point out that if we are to attribute all the views of all of her characters to an author then it will lead us to some puzzling conclusions: that Harper Lee, for example, writing racist dialogue in To Kill a Mockingbird, was a racist. I could further point out that Chanu, who is rude about all sorts of people, is not my protagonist, and that Nazneen, who is, does not share Chanu's views. It is futile to do so, however, just as it is futile to argue that far from being received as a negative portrayal that would damage or undermine the image of a community as its "leaders" claim to fear, the novel was received as a warm and sympathetic portrayal, with readers and critics alike proclaiming an entirely different sort of response.

These arguments proceed from logic and reason. Therefore they do not speak to the point, the point being this: how the protesters feel. The protesters say they feel offended. They feel hurt. They feel angry. They feel upset. Whatever their reasons, whether sound or misguided, the one thing it is not possible to argue with is their feelings.

All sorts of people take offence at all sorts of things. When Irvine Welsh's junkie novel, Trainspotting, was published, some people in Edinburgh objected to the way it portrayed their city. No one took much notice. The feelings of an offended ethnic minority, though (or rather a tiny minority within a minority) rank more highly. Undoubtedly offering to burn books helps. But there is something more fundamental going on here. The white, middle-class good burghers of Edinburgh can look after themselves, but when offence is taken by the underdog those feelings are valued more highly.

I can understand this liberal sentiment. But I fear it is taking us to a dangerous place, a marketplace of outrage at which more and more buyers and sellers are arriving, shouting their wares and inflating the prices. And now it is open for business it will not be possible to keep people out. The essence of this new economy is emotion. If the feelings run (or are seen to run) high and deep enough, a good price will be fetched.

If the best we can say is how we feel about something, we turn from reason to a type of emotivism in which the frameworks for moral and political judgments collapse. It is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon that has an invidious effect not only at this relatively local level, but also on the world stage. Neo-conservative rhetoric on good and evil leads the way. In Bush and Blair's war against Iraq, the presence or otherwise of WMD was simply a sideshow. "I only know what I believe," said Blair. Never let facts get in the way of how you feel. Fiction is now, apparently, the place for fact; in real life it shouldn't intrude.

When Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote Behzti, a play that featured sexual abuse within a gurdwara (a Sikh temple), some Sikhs felt offended. Offering rational argument (that this is a real issue and legitimate subject, for instance) constitutes no line of defence against this particular charge. That there was no intent to offend is also thrown out of court. If offence is felt, the artist has no recourse - this is how you made someone feel. The government too, it appears, has no recourse, other than to remain silent, which it shamefully did in the face of the forced closure of Bhatti's play at Birmingham Rep in 2004 and relocation of filming away from Brick Lane.

If this seems like a minority issue that will affect only writers from the margin, let me now make the case that it is anything but. Christian groups are already trading in the outrage economy, as witnessed by the Jerry Springer, The Opera campaign. Read the tabloids and even some of the more supposedly respectable newspapers, and it is clear that outrage is being manufactured to counter outrage. My deepest fear is not that the outrage economy remains alien but that we enter it wholeheartedly. Whose voices will be loudest then?

What of the film? After Prince Charles's refusal to watch it at the royal film performance, the initial announcement of a "diary clash" was swiftly followed up by a Clarence House spokesman explaining that it was also because the content of the film wasn't "appropriate". It's difficult to fathom what is not "appropriate". The film that Sarah Gavron has made is a sort of feel-good movie - an examination of love in all its different guises. In content it is in no way controversial or political. Or, rather, it is political only in one very particular way: the story is told from the point of view of a marginalised voice. Accepting that that voice can be every bit as rich and nuanced, individual and interesting as any other is profoundly political in a society which too often measures its minorities in banner headlines.

When I first saw the film it was a rough cut, several months ago. I hadn't been involved with it at all. Scripts had been delivered and sat unopened on the floor. I didn't go to watch any castings or filming. I thought Sarah should do what she wanted, free from interference from everyone including me. In the screening room, as Sarah talked through a list of things that she felt were wrong or had yet to be done, I began to think I had made a terrible mistake. I remembered a quote by John le Carré: "Having your book turned into a film," he said, "is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." The previous night, thinking about the screening, I'd pulled an old issue of Granta, dedicated to film, off the shelf. The first article was by John Fowles, a diary he kept during the shooting of The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. On one page he's enthusing about a location shoot with Michael Caine for The Magus. "He brings a nice presence to what he does . . . Very far from being a fool about his job." On the next he's seen a rough cut of the film. "A terrible feeling of disappointment . . . Caine is excruciatingly bad, totally incredible . . . Guy Green [the director] is to blame."

I'd had my concerns at the outset, of course. The story requires the reader to live inside Nazneen's head. For a fair old chunk of the novel she scarcely speaks. I'd worried about the transfer from page to screen, but I'd never really thought it would get that far. Options get bought and options lapse. Films get started and the funding falls apart. Mainly I didn't think about it all.

As I watched the rough cut I spent the whole time either thinking about what had been left out (despite telling myself to leave the book outside the door) or being thrilled to hear dialogue from the novel spoken by the actors. In other words, I was a hopeless viewer, and it was only after I'd left the room that I realised the film might have some special quality of its own.

I've seen it again since, and watched it for the first time on a huge screen and with an audience in Toronto. There were around 600 people in the theatre and I confess to concentrating almost as hard on them as the film. They laughed, gasped and snivelled discreetly (or in some cases not so discreetly) and for the first time in my life I began to believe in the wisdom of crowds.

Afterwards there was a question and answer session. "Usually when a book is made into a film, it loses a lot of what was on the page. How did you manage to translate so much of the beauty and sensitivity of the book onto the screen?" "That's the kind of question I like," said Sarah. The second question was directed to the actors. "How did you prepare for your roles?" Tannishtha Chatterjee, one of India's leading art-house actors who plays Nazneen, explained how she had learned to speak English with a London Bangladeshi accent. Satish Kaushik, who plays Nazneen's bumptious husband, Chanu, took the microphone. Earlier, Satish had told me that he knew he would get the part when he read the book and saw Chanu described as having a "frog face". "Thanks for these clappings," he said, sweating beneath the lights. "I had more preparation to do. First I had to learn to speak English." It was a pure Chanu moment and I knew from the warmth and affection he inspired from the crowd that they had taken Satish, at that moment conflated with Chanu, into their hearts.

I'd met Tannistha the previous evening and ventured that Nazneen was a difficult role. "I know," she agreed. "I just had to act with my eyes." Luckily, she has extremely expressive eyes and expressive hands also. Somehow she manages to convey an interior life through looks and gestures, and she also seems to get more beautiful as the film goes along, as if in some outward expression of an inner state of being.

Tannistha was the first person to audition for the role. Though the director and producers immediately thought she was great, she had to wait until they'd satisfied themselves by seeing a lot of other actors. Christopher Simpson, who plays Nazneen's lover, Karim, told me he'd come to the first reading I'd given, which was in the East End. When he read the novel he clocked Karim as a potential role. When he auditioned, however, he also had to wait an age before being cast, this time because he was up against the filmmakers' desire to find someone from the Brick Lane area, someone, in other words, a bit more like Karim.

We had a little conversation about the authenticity game. "But I'm an actor," he said, justifiably bemused. Part Irish, part Rwandan, part Greek, he'd be waiting perhaps forever for an authentic role to come up. I asked him if he had any qualms about playing Karim. "I like nothing more than a part that requires attention and care for a milieu outside my explicit experience," he said. I took the answer to be no. He said he hoped to bring to bear Karim's "fragility combined with his vigour". This he accomplishes in a performance that delivers both sensitivity and physical energy. Tannishtha and Christopher weave some sort of magic between them to make their relationship seem inevitable rather than merely credible.

Satish, despite his "Chanu moment" has, of course, nothing in common with the character he plays. Chanu's appeal lies in his tragi-comic uselessness. Satish is a highly successful actor and one of India's best-loved film directors. I asked him why he agreed to take the role. "I was in Delhi, resting between films, when I got the call from a casting agent. I went to the Oxford Book Store in Connaught Place and bought a copy of the novel. First I flicked through the pages to see how often Chanu's name appears - when I saw he was on every page I started to read. By the time I finished reading I just felt so much for him."

At dinner, Satish told me that working on Brick Lane had made him think about the kind of film he wants to direct in the future. "I always made happy films, you know, very happy but very light. This film made me want to do something more serious also." He is just completing a movie about teenage pregnancy in India. If Chanu managed to get under his skin a bit, Satish in an uncanny performance on screen inhabits every inch of Chanu.

It might not have had its royal performance, but Brick Lane premieres at the London Film Festival at the end of the month. In a sense, no damage has been done by the "controversy". But I keep thinking about a couple of young women I met in the East End, one of them at a reading, the other after a talk I gave at the Newham Asian Women's Project. Both said they wanted to write. Both were worried what their parents would think, what people in general would think. What should they do? "Keep writing," I told them blithely. "Find your voice and use it. Be brave." I would tell them the same thing today, but I wouldn't be so blithe about it, and maybe today, after all that has happened, they wouldn't even ask.

· Brick Lane premieres at the London Film Festival on October 26. It opens on general release on November 16